


Eighth Wonder

by ant5b



Category: Darkwing Duck (Cartoon 1991), DuckTales (Cartoon 2017)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Kidnapping, M/M, Minor Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-28
Updated: 2019-05-28
Packaged: 2020-03-20 17:42:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,436
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18997411
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ant5b/pseuds/ant5b
Summary: Gosalyn saves herself. Oh, and she saves Darkwing, too.





	Eighth Wonder

 

They take her a block from the orphanage. 

Like all little kids, Gosalyn was warned to stay away from strangers. She was told to avoid strange vans, to travel in groups, and never go out at night. 

She’s walking home after hockey practice when they kidnap her. It’s the middle of the day. She and four other kids are lugging their hockey gear in bags almost as big as they are, when a bright green van with a decal for “Ave’s Plumbing” opens and three men dressed in black pour out. 

They head straight for Gosalyn. She watches them shove away two other girls before they’re upon her, grabbing her arms in a vice like grip that bruises the moment it makes contact. 

She doesn’t make it easy for them to drag her into the van. She drops her heavy duffel bag and lashes out with her hockey stick, clocking the donkey in the face and then hitting the ram in his crotch. But the biggest man, a goat in a pinstriped suit, knocks her hockey stick out of her hands and seizes her. 

“Cute, kid,” he sneers, wearing the approximation of a smile. 

They drag her, kicking and screaming, into the van. 

Gosalyn’s only stifled once they have her inside. A sack is shoved over her head and they yank her arms back so they can affix zip ties to her wrists. She thinks she manages to kick one of them in the gut before they get the idea to zip tie her ankles too. 

She’s doesn’t know how long they drive for. Her brain goes fuzzy, like there’s cotton stuffed in her ears, and the screeching of tires melds with the voices of her captors speaking over her head into one dissonant cacophony. Nothing feels quite real. 

Eventually the van stops and the door slides open, now easily the most menacing sound she’s ever heard. Gosalyn’s hiked up onto someone’s shoulder and carried out. She struggles on principle, despite the five foot fall and her bound limbs, not to mention her actual kidnappers. 

They keep talking, but panic has set in so deeply that she couldn’t hope to unravel what they’re saying. Her vision is a world of black, and she feels like she’s suffocating under the sack. 

It’s not until the men fall silent, and the slightly nasal voice of the goat rises above the quiet, that clarity returns. 

“We got the girl, boss.”

Gosalyn hears the creak of leather, a thud. Then a smothering presence that draws nearer in tandem with the sound of heavy footfalls. She can’t see a thing, but she’s certain that it looms over her now, if only judging by the way the goat’s arm trembles over where its pinning her legs to his chest. 

The sack is ripped off her head with one fierce yank, jerking her head back from the force of it. She blinks spots out of her vision at the abrupt confluence of brightness, but not for long, because a ponderous mass steps forward to blot out the light. She can make out cruel, sharp horns jutting out over his head and a blood-red suit. 

“Gosalyn Waddlemeyer,” the bull says in a rumbling Russian accent, reminding her of thunder from a fast-encroaching storm. “I’ve looked forward to meeting you.”

 

They throw her in a cell, like something out of a movie. It’s a small windowless cement room with an intimidating metal door that has a thin slot for the guard to look in, and a larger slot on the bottom she’ll learn is for them to slide in food on a tray. There’s a cot with thin blankets and a toilet in the corner. 

All she has are the clothes on her back. 

The goat, Hammerhead she’ll later learn he’s called, cuts the zip ties binding her and shoves her inside. She doesn’t try to fight him this time, and the door slams shut with an echoing clang. 

Gosalyn curls up on the dingy cot, feeling like she might throw up, and her head buzzes like a shaken beehive. She tugs the blankets up over her head, despite how musty they smell because she’s trembling too badly to care. 

She still doesn’t know what they want from her. 

 

She isn’t sure how much time passes before the slot on the bottom of the door opens, and a Birdy’s meal is slide in on a tray. Gosalyn just stares at the bright yellow bag, so incongruous with her dirty prison that it’s almost unreal. She can’t bring herself to get up and eat it, as her stomach hasn’t stopped churning since the men first descended upon her. 

Gosalyn closes her eyes and lays back down on the hard cot, clenching her eyes shut so tightly she sees stars. Despite her terror she sleeps fitfully, but being unable to see outside she has no idea how much time is passing. That realization frightens her. 

It could be a few minutes or a few hours later that the door to her cell opens again. Gosalyn jerks up, and immediately wishes she hadn’t. 

The massive blue bull from earlier fills the doorway, his horns nearly brushing the frame. He’s wearing a different suit, this one a darker blue than him, and Gosalyn wonders in horror if that means a full day has already passed. 

“You haven’t eaten,” he says, sounding amused. “Was the food not to your liking?”

“I’m not hungry,” Gosalyn retorts, crossing her arms to hide how badly she’s shaking. 

“You need to eat,” he says, stepping into her cell and sending Gosalyn scrambling back on her cot, until she hits the wall. “Keep your strength up.”

“Why am I here?” she bites out. “Why did you kidnap me?” Her voice breaks and she hates herself a little for it. 

“Ah.” The bull smiles, curling his mouth at a leisurely pace. “Where are my manners. I am Taurus Bulba. And you, Gosalyn, are going to help me with a little science experiment.”

 

They put a sack over her head again, and lead her out into the hall. She tries to count the number of turns they make, how many steps they take, but her chest feels tight and they continue to shove her forward roughly whenever she hesitates, making her stumble, and she loses track. 

Wherever they’re leading her, it’s loud. The noise level rises the further they walk, until Gosalyn is able to parse out the clacking of computer keys, a dull humming sound, and the murmur of voices deep in conversation. 

The sack is pulled of her head, and Gosalyn squints against the sudden brightness of what she immediately recognizes as a laboratory. She’s in a wide cement room with a high ceiling, lined with shiny metal tables and computers and large generators. Milling about are a handful of men and women in lab coats, clustered around computers and talking as they point things out on tablets. 

At the far end of the room, taking up the entire back wall, is an enormous silver raygun, the last invention her grandfather ever worked on. 

“Good, you recognize the Ramrod,” Bulba says beside Gosalyn, startling her badly. He grabs her shoulder in a meaty fist, his grip unyielding as he guides her forward. 

She tries to catch the eye of the scientists she passes, desperately hoping that at least one of them will take pity and call the police, tell someone where she is,  _ help her _ . But those that don’t ignore her take one look in her direction and immediately look away, like she isn’t even there. 

Bulba stops her in front of the Ramrod, facing its control panel. 

Gosalyn is thrust back in time to when she would run around her grandfather’s personal lab, as wondrous to her as a mad scientist’s lair. How he’d let her follow him around, his own personal shadow, an answer ready for her every question. She remembers the last time she saw the Waddlemeyer Ramrod when, not even a year ago, she sat alone on the floor of the lab, still dressed in black from the funeral, as their lives were packed up in boxes downstairs. 

“How-where did you get this?” Gosalyn demands, affronted on her grandfather’s behalf. 

Bulba clicks his tongue. “Why, all I did was catch the right train.” 

“No, this was my Grandpa’s! You stole it!” 

“Stealing is such a harsh word,” he replies. “And beside the point.” He gestures to the Ramrod’s controls. “Do you remember what it is meant to do?”

“It makes things float and stuff,” Gosalyn mutters. 

Bulba laughs, a deep, rich sound that makes her feathers stand on end. “How quaint. But correct nonetheless. Now,” he turns Gosalyn to face him fully, his grip like iron on her shoulder, as the two dark pits he has for eyes bore into hers with an intensity that lodges her heart in her throat. “How do I arm it?”

Gosalyn blinks. “I...I don’t know,” she says honestly. 

Bulba’s grip tightens, her shoulder protesting in spiking pain. 

“Your freedom hinges on the answer to this question,” he says quietly, with undisguised menace. “How do I arm the Ramrod?”

I don’t know!” Gosalyn says again, tears stinging her eyes and clogging her throat. “Grandpa just, he just never told me! I swear I don’t  _ know _ .”

Bulba’s squeezes her shoulder with increasing pressure, and for one wild moment she’s certain he’s going to crush it in his grip. Instead he lets her go so abruptly that she flounders, tripping over her feet and landing on her backside. 

“Then I suppose you’ll just have to stay with us a little longer,” Bulba says congenially, tugging his sleeves and straightening his cufflinks. “Until we can jog your memory.”

The sack is thrust back over her head before she can utter a word of protest. 

 

Gosalyn has no idea how long she’s been here. 

Without windows, without clocks, without any way to tell whether it’s day or night, she has almost no grasp of the passage of time. They leave her alone in her cell for the most part, her contact with her guards limited to when they shove metal trays of food through the slot. After that first Birdy’s meal, the rest of the food she’s given is more reminiscent of prison food, which she figures is like cafeteria food but worse. She receives limp hamburgers and sandwiches, and flavorless, watery oatmeal. 

It’s the meals that she uses to clue her into how much time is passing. She receives something that vaguely resembles breakfast food and later she’s given something like lunch or dinner. Then the cycle repeats. Her best guess is that each cycle is another day. Based on this math, she’s been here for four days. 

Even as she figures it out, a large part of her is terrified that it’s just a game her captors are playing with her. Maybe she’s been here even longer than she realizes, and her friends and the orphanage staff and the police all think she’s dead. 

And the worst thing is that it’s very much possible that they’re toying with her. 

Bulba shows up at her cell randomly, even when she’s sleeping, and has her dragged down the hall into another cement room. Here, they tie her down in a chair and use a harness to keep her head still as a light spins around her, making her feel dizzy and tired. 

A women wreathed in shadow, standing outside of the circle of light, will ask her questions. 

“What is your name?”

“What’s the address you grew up at?”

“What happened the day your grandfather died?”

“What did your parents look like?”

“What are the colors on the Ramrod’s control panel?”

“What is the sequence necessary to arm it?”

Gosalyn will feel like she’s lost control of her beak and tongue in those moments, as she answers questions she couldn’t remember the answers to. She was too young to remember what her parents looked like outside of old photographs, and the day her grandfather died was a blank in her mind. 

But to her horror, every time they bring her into this room, she answers each question, except for the last. And each times to fails to answer it, she hears Bulba growl in the dark. 

They’ve dragged her to the dark room five times now. They don’t bother blindfolding her anymore, allowing her to see the veritable maze of hallways and closed doors that makes up her labyrinthine prison. They let her see it so they don’t have to say, “there’s no way you’re getting out of here.”

Every moment she spends here is an uncertainty. Just when she thinks she’s figured out the matching cycle of her meals and the days passing, they stop feeding her, for how long she doesn’t know. But Gosalyn is left too weak to do anything but curl up in the middle of her cot, her stomach yawning so empty that it aches. Then they take her in for another round of questioning, saying they wanted to see if being on an empty stomach has any effect on her answers. 

The effect is that she would end up passing out. 

When they start feeding her again, Gosalyn starts fighting again. 

She knows that she can’t give them what they want, and even if she could, she doesn’t think they’ll let her go, like Bulba keeps promising he will. These men are criminals, the scientists who ignored her are criminals. But without her grandfather’s invention, they’re just a bunch of people who’ve kidnapped a little girl. If they had the Ramrod, they would become the kinds of supervillains she watches Gizmoduck stop on the news. He would rip apart the Ramrod with one hand and drop Bulba and Hammerhead and all the rest off in jail with the other. 

But they don’t have the Ramrod. All they have is her, and Gizmoduck isn’t going to save her. 

So Gosalyn starts fighting again, because the only alternative is giving up and she’s always been too stubborn to give up on anything. 

 

She makes an enemy in Hammerhead without really meaning to. 

The next time they drag her to the dark room, after they’ve started feeding her again, she makes a run for it. 

Hammerhead gives chase. He catches up to her quickly, grabbing her shirt and jerking her backward. But in trying to get away from him, she loses her footing and falls onto her back. When Hammerhead stands over her and reaches down to yank her back up, she kicks him in the face as hard as she can. She thinks that his teeth must’ve dug into his bottom lip because it erupts in a fountain of blood, and he swears a bluestreak as he presses his hands to his mouth in an attempt to staunch it. 

Bulba just laughs and tells Hammerhead to get cleaned up. “You certainly have a lot of spirit,” he says, in what almost passes for admiration, and it fills Gosalyn to the brim with loathing and disgust, because how dare he be the only person since her grandfather to see her for who she is. 

Hammerhead glares at her as she’d handed off to the talkative ram henchman, hateful as anything, and Gosalyn just smiles. 

She doesn’t think too much time passes before they come to take her to the dark room again. Only this time she’s asleep, and Hammerhead decides to wake her by dumping a bucket of ice cold water on her. 

Gosalyn wakes up gasping, choking and freezing, her cot and thin blankets soaked through. 

Hammerhead grins, the stitches in his lip straining. 

This, of course, means war. 

The next time Hammerhead is on guard duty, delivering her morning meal, Gosalyn throws the tray and all the food on it against the wall. She kicks and screams and throws the most fantastic tantrum of her life, and makes sure to tuck the metal tray under her cot. 

Hammerhead throws open the door to her cell, fuming, and slaps her so hard she falls to the floor. Bulba doesn’t allow his men to hurt her, not really, but she’s gotten used to being smacked around on occasion. 

“Shut the hell up, kid,” he barks, “Keep this up and see if we even feed you tomorrow.”

Gosalyn doesn’t look up until he leaves, and when the lock engages on the other side she smiles, and the reddened, aching mark on her cheek feels like a badge of pride. 

He forgot to take back the tray. 

 

Gosalyn doesn’t know how long she’s been here when she learns Bulba’s imprisoned someone else. 

Her counting is all messed up, so it could be anything from ten days to twenty when she hears some of his men talking outside her door. The man that brings her food and the guard who slides it through the slot usually chat for a bit, and Gosalyn has learned to listen. Any piece of information could be crucial to her escape, and never more so than right at this moment. 

“So they finally got him, huh?” her guard says. 

“Oh, yeah,” the other replies. “Should’ve seen it, them dragging him through here. Thought Hammerhead was gonna pop, he was so goddamn proud of himself. Jokes on him though, ‘cause he didn’t get the guy’s partner. So he’s still stuck on guard duty.” 

“Woof,” the guard says. “Tough break. How’d they catch him, anyway? I thought he was a ghost.”

The other man snorted. “He was looking for the girl.”

“Well, he definitely found her.”

Gosalyn leans back against the wall in wonder, because someone had been  _ looking  _ for her. Someone had tried to save her. Her, little orphan Gosalyn who’s too rough with the other kids, who brakes more windows that she made friends, and who nobody but her grandfather ever wanted. Someone had gotten captured for  _ her _ . 

If Gosalyn was determined to escape before, she’s doubly so now. 

But she can’t rush headfirst into this like she does everything else. She’s already started taking the necessary steps, and now she just needs to be patient. She hopes that her fellow prisoner can hold on for just a few more days. 

But the next time she sees Bulba, his knuckles are purple with bruises but he’s smiling. Her stomach falls somewhere near the vicinity of her soles, and for a long moment she’s certain that she’s already too late. 

But as she’s leaving the dark room, woozier than usual, she hears the men escorting her back to her cell muttering amongst themselves. 

“The boss sure looked happy, but I can’t figure out why. The kid didn’t say anything different.”

“He got to pay our other guest a  _ visit  _ earlier. Guess that put him in a good mood.”

It’s not much to go on, but Gosalyn has to believe it means that the man who came to save her is still alive. Which means she can finally put her plan into motion. 

 

She waits until Hammerhead’s the one on duty. He gets the longest shifts, forced to sit outside her door for what she imagines is hours as punishment from Bulba. That means he’s always irritated, and doubly so with her. He’s less likely to think clearly, too. 

So she accepts her first meal, but eats sparingly. When he’s shoving the second through the slot some time later, Gosalyn is already curled up in her cot, facing away from him. 

When she doesn’t rise and come for her food, Hammerhead pounds on the door. 

“Hey, kid,” he snaps through the slot,“Soup’s on. Chef prepared a nice peanut butter sandwich for you, all special like.”

“I don’t feel good,” Gosalyn warbles as pathetically as she can. 

“That’s too bad,” he replies. “Now come get your food. I’m not gettin’ any younger.”

“Or prettier,” Gosalyn says innocently, “unless the ladies like that split lip I gave you.”

Hammerhead growls, and the slot slams shut. Bingo. 

She leaps out of bed as Hammerhead undoes the locks on her door. She picks up the metal tray he’d never taken back, gripping it tightly in her sweaty hands. She presses herself tight against the wall right beside the door, where Hammerhead won’t immediately see her. 

He throws the door open furiously, already swearing. “You’re askin’ for it, brat. Let’s see how tough you are when _ —” _ Hammerhead breaks off with a yell when he trips over the sheet Gosalyn’s stretched thin and tied between her cot and the toilet bowl. 

He lands on his hands and knees, and that’s when Gosalyn descends on him. Aiming with the sharp corner of the metal tray, she hits him once, twice, in the temple with all the force she can muster. 

Hammerhead collapses, blood trailing from the side of his head. 

“Let’s see how tough you are,” Gosalyn mutters, rubbing the sweat out of her eyes. 

She fishes through Hammerhead’s pockets and finds a ring of keys. She grips it tightly, so none of them will rattle, and walks out of the cell on her own for the first time. She peers around the corner first, and listens for the sound of footsteps, but it seems she’s alone for now. 

She locks the cell door behind her, after taking a moment to find the right key, and heads in the opposite direction of where she knows the dark room is. 

Distantly, she can hear the sound of a commotion, raised voices and grinding metal, and she wonders if they’ve figured out the Ramrod all on their own. Whatever is it, as long as it keeps her path clear, she hopes it continues. 

She finds many cell doors similar to her own, but brief glances through the slots reveal that they’re all empty. But she doesn’t stop looking, and her patience wins out. 

Gosalyn finds a cell door with an empty chair outside of it. She supposes that must belong to the guard, wherever he is. Her heart firmly lodged in her throat, she steps forward and raises the slot in the door to peer inside. 

The cell is as dark as hers was, and even more sparsely furnished. There’s no cot, but there is a man chained to the far wall, slumped over and face hidden from view. 

With shaking hands, Gosalyn finds the correct key and unlocks the cell. 

The man inside stiffens immediately at the opening of the door, raising his head to glower at whoever stands in the doorway. The light from the hallway spills across his face, drawing attention to the proud set of his cracked beat and the lurid purple of his bruised eye, swelled shut beneath his matching mask. 

But the moment he sees her his nobel bearing falters, and he sags in perfect shock. 

“It’s you…” he says. “How…?”

His purple suit is dark in places, his cape torn and dirtied and his hat is missing entirely, but Gosalyn would know him anywhere. 

“You’re Darkwing Duck,” she breathes. 

“I…yeah,” he says, a little dazedly. “You… you know me?”

Gosalyn could laugh. Or cry. 

Does she  _ know  _ him?  

He’s the only reason she watches the news at the orphanage, hoping to catch even a glimpse of him. Gizmoduck may deal in supervillains, but Darkwing puts away the gangs that threaten her and the other kids in the orphanage. He goes after drug kingpins and muggers and the guy that robbed Francisco's bodega down the street. She just never thought he would come for her. 

“Yeah,” she replies, quickly entering his cell. She kneels beside him, swimming in wonder as she searches for the right key to free him. “You came to save me.”

His answering smile is a little more of a grimace. “Seems I didn’t do a very good job of it.”

“But you came.” She unlocks the chain around his wrist and smiles brilliantly at him. He freezes in the middle of rubbing his bruised wrist, looking stunned. 

“Of course I did,” he says, like it’s that simple. “You needed help. Or, at least, I  _ thought  _ you did.” He laughs a little, pushing himself up to his feet. “But clearly you can take care of yourself.”

Darkwing’s hardly risen to his full height before he’s hunching over anew, clutching at his side with a groan. 

Worry bubbles up in Gosalyn’s chest, hot and suffocating. “You don’t look so good.”

“It looks worse than it feels,” Darkwing grunts. 

“Really?”

“No, no it hurts pretty bad.” He raised his head and blinked a few times, his one visible eye squinting in pain. “You might wanna go on without me, kiddo,” he says gently, “I’ll catch up.”

“Not happening,” Gosalyn retorts firmly. She ducks under his arm on his uninjured side, supporting him as best she can. 

He shakes his head with a disbelieving breath of a laugh. “You’re something else.”

They begin shuffling out of the cell. It’s slow-going, but even as they exit out into the hall, they don’t encounter any of Bulba’s men. The distant commotion from earlier continues unabated. 

They’re nearly to where Gosalyn believes the exit is when the entire building shakes, with the sound of something like an explosion. 

“What was that?” she exclaims. 

“That,” Darkwing says, sounding very fond, “was my partner. You chose one heck of a time for a daring escape, kid.”

They reach a door unlike the others, with a crash bar and a clear plastic window. Darkwing pushes it open with free hand, and Gosalyn’s overwhelmed with a chilling night breeze and the smell of fresh air. 

They’re out. 

There’s a small flight of stairs to climb, and then they’re on the street, illuminated by a few flickering streetlights. The sky is dark and endless over them and Gosalyn thinks it’s the best thing she’s ever seen, after the hero leaning against her. 

“We’ve gotta get out of the blast radius,” Darkwing is saying, already moving forward and Gosalyn scrambles to catch up, lest he fall over, “knowing Launchpad, he’s gonna overload the Ramrod.”

Darkwing refuses to let them stop until they’ve moved three blocks away. There he directs her into an alley beside an abandoned office building. 

“We’ve gotta get up to the roof,” he says, and Gosalyn gawks at him. 

“Is that a good idea?” 

“All my ideas are good ideas,” he replies lightly, removing one of the big yellow discs from his uniform. “Except, y’know, when they’re really, really bad.”

Gosalyn watches in awe as he unspools from it an impossibly long, thin metal cord. With a bit of fiddling, the disc folds upward into a grappling hook. 

“Holy crow,” she breathes. “Where’d you get that?”

Darkwing smiles wryly. “A friend of a friend who used to be spy.”

He swings his arm back, and lets loose the grapnel. It hooks on the roof of the office building, and he tugs on it a few times to ensure its stability. 

“Hold on tight, kid,” Darkwing says, kneeling so Gosalyn can wrap her arms around his neck. She’s careful to avoid his injured side, and he cradles her back with his free arm. 

He presses some hidden button on the cord he’s holding, and they go shooting up to the roof faster than she would’ve thought possible. Darkwing sets her down before nearly falling over. 

“Whoa,” Gosalyn says, helping him sit down. He ends up leaning against a roof air conditioner. “Are you okay?”

Darkwing chuckles hoarsely. “Shouldn’t I be the one asking you that?”

Gosalyn shrugs, but doesn’t say that none of this feel quite real. The girl that knocked out Hammerhead and helped Darkwing escape from an underground evil lair feels far afield from the girl sitting dirty and sweaty on a rooftop. Part of her is certain that she’s dreaming all of this, and she’ll be woken up by Hammerhead dumping another bucket of water on her. 

She feels Darkwing staring at her though, and when she turns to look at him his expression is grave. “All joking aside, are you alright, Gosalyn? Are you injured? Is there anything you need?” 

Gosalyn looks down at her trembling hands, not so different from when she was taken. “Um, I don’t know the date,” she says quietly. “And I need real food. Mob bosses really suck in the cooking department.”

Darkwing smiles gently, if a little sadly. She sees his hands clench into tight fists, but none of that shows on his face. “It’s the eighteenth. You were were in there for two weeks. As for food, once we’re healed up I’ll buy you whatever—”

A brilliant explosion lights up the night from a building about three blocks away. She can feel the heat from here, and it’s indisputably real. Smoke and fire plumes into the air, black and red and orange and yellow, and  _ this  _ might be the most amazing thing Gosalyn has ever seen. 

After Darkwing Duck, of course. 

She jumps to her feet and punches the air, brimming with ecstatic, hysterical energy because she’s really, truly free. She laughs as she watches her prison burn, and then she starts to cry. 

“Whoa, hey,” Darkwing starts to say, looking worried. He starts to stand up. 

Gosalyn waves him away, wiping furiously at her eyes with her other hand. “No, no, I’m okay. I’m  _ more  _ than okay.”

She looks back over at the smoldering flames, beginning to hear the sound of distantly approaching sirens. “Did your partner do that?”

“Yeah,” Darkwing says, sounding fond all over again, “that’s my—Launchpad!” 

Gosalyn looks up at his cry. There’s a plane she never thought she’d see in person streaking toward them, emerging from behind the thick black smoke. It stops above them, hovering quietly, before descending onto the roof. Darkwing’s on his feet before it’s even touched down, stumbling toward the cockpit as quickly as he can. 

The pilot emerges, a red haired, barrel-chested duck who looks simultaneously terrified and overjoyed to see Darkwing. 

“DW,” he says in a rush, practically jumping out his seat. He meets Darkwing midway, catching him as he collapses forward. They both fall to their knees, the pilot wrapping his arms around Darkwing’s shoulders. Darkwing buries his face in the pilot’s chest. 

“DW,” he says again, voice thick, “you’re okay.”

The pilot sees Gosalyn, hovering uncertainly behind Darkwing, and he smiles widely through his tears. “Oh man, kiddo, are you a sight for sore eyes. We’ve been looking everywhere for you.” 

He beckons her over, and Gosalyn approaches hesitantly. He reaches out to her with one hand, gently rubbing her arm as he looks her over for injuries. 

“Is Darkwing gonna be okay?” she asks quietly. 

“You betcha,” the pilot answers confidently. “Little bit of R & R and he’s good as new.”

“Maybe a lot of R & R, Launchpad,” Darkwing groans. He pulls back enough to meet Gosalyn’s gaze, and he smiles tiredly. “What do you say, kiddo? I heard Tahiti’s very nice this time of year.”

Gosalyn realizes she’s started crying again, but she doesn’t much care as she wipes her eyes and smiles back. “You wouldn’t leave St. Canard,” she says, with a certainty she feels in her bones. 

Darkwing makes a show of sighing longsufferingly. “I guess not. Besides, we heroes need to stick together, don’t we?”

Gosalyn nods, smiling, but she still hasn’t stopped crying. Her knees give out, and she falls on her backside. The last weeks of horror rise up to drown her, at odds with the all encompassing relief of seeing the ash and embers in the air, and having Darkwing brush her tears away and Launchpad pick her up in his arms, gentle as anything. 

They carry her to the  _ Thunderquack  _ and lay her down in the backseat. Launchpad covers her with his jacket, and she’s enveloped by the scent of engine oil and mint. It reminds Gosalyn of when her grandfather worked long hours in his lab, coming home smelling like all sorts of chemicals. 

She keeps her eyes open long enough to see the city shrink down to an ocean of lights as they take off, the  _ Thunderquack  _ rumbling gently under her ear. 

A hand rest gently against her hair, and Darkwing says, “Thank you, Gosalyn.” 

She leans into the touch, feeling warm and safe for the first time in two weeks. “Y’know,” she says sleepily, “if you play your cards right I might let you be my sidekick.”

Launchpad chuckles, a low and comforting sound, and Drake laughs until he wheezes. 

“I’d like that, kiddo,” Darkwing says, and it’s the last thing Gosalyn hears before she falls asleep. 

 


End file.
